ADRIAN MORGAN: MEDIA MANIPULATION AND LIES…….MUSTREAD

9/11 Anniversary: Media Manipulation and Lies

The hysteria that accompanied the build-up to the ninth anniversary of 9/11, fueled by arguments about the Ground Zero Mosque and a plan to burn Korans, threatened to overshadow the somber reflection that usually accompanies 9/11 anniversaries.

Though Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville Florida failed to burn Korans on the 9/11 anniversary, two preachers in Springfield Tennessee did burn Korans. Evangelical pastors Reverend Bob Old and the Reverend Danny Allen carried through their plans and incinerated the Korans in a private ceremony. Rev Bob Old said before incinerating a Koran in a barbecue oven:

“It’s about faith, it’s about love, but you have to have the right book behind you. This is a book of hate, not a book of love.”

In New York, one man tore pages from a Koran and burned them, one at a time, until he was arrested (video here). As he burned the pages he was heckled by a man with a Jamaican accent, and photographers snapped pictures.

The issue of the Ground Zero mosque, which appeared from the get-go to have been stage-managed to cause the maximum offense to Americans, has been made a national issue by the president. On Friday, August 13, during an iftar dinner at the White House, where some of the guests were Muslim Brotherhood, Obama had declared that

“Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”

At the Pentagon Memorial on Saturday, Obama delivered a speech in which he suggested that America would never be at war with Islam:

They may seek to spark conflict between different faiths, but as Americans we are not — and never will be — at war with Islam. It was not a religion that attacked us that September day — it was al Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion. And just as we condemn intolerance and extremism abroad, so will we stay true to our traditions here at home as a diverse and tolerant nation. We champion the rights of every American, including the right to worship as one chooses — as service members and civilians from many faiths do just steps from here, at the very spot where the terrorists struck this building.

Those who attacked us sought to demoralize us, divide us, to deprive us of the very unity, the very ideals, that make America America — those qualities that have made us a beacon of freedom and hope to billions around the world. Today we declare once more we will never hand them that victory. As Americans, we will keep alive the virtues and values that make us who we are and who we must always be.

In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the hijacked United AirlinesFlight 93 had been brought down in a field, apparently as a result of passengers attacking the hijackers, Michelle Obama gave a speech. She was accompanied by Laura Bush.

It is true that America is not at war with Islam, but around the world, many Muslims believe that America is at war with them, and a proportion of these Muslims also fervently believe that it is their duty to wage jihad against America.

Obama’s 9/11 speech at the Pentagon Memorial was relayed around the world, and was reported favourably in Muslim countries such as Pakistan.

There was a rally in New York on 9/11, organized by SIOA (Stop Islamization of America) and FDI (Freedom Defense Initiative) attended by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer (who both lead SIOA). Former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton spoke at the event via a video link, and on a podium and flanked by his bodyguards, Dutch politican Geert Wilders spoke to the crowd. His speech can be seen in a video here.

Wilders knows the full ferocity of Islamist fanatics. When documentary-maker Theo van Gogh was slaughtered on an Amsterdam street on November 2, 2004, Geert Wilders’ name was on a list of targets to be killed for offending Islam. The list was secured to van Gogh’s body by being pinned with a knife sticking into the film-maker’s chest. Since that time, he has received hundreds of death threats in the Netherlands.

Even though he is a member of the Dutch Parliament, he is awaiting trial for “inciting hatred and of discriminating against Muslims by comparing their religion to Nazism.” That trial will take place in the Netherlands, a nation that formerly gave sanctuary to Spinoza and has been upheld as a bastion of freedom of expression. Dutch days of freedom seem to be a thing of the past.

Though the numbers at Saturday’s 9/11 Freedom Rally were high (see picture at top of page) the press in America and Europe tended to disparage the event as either diminishing the gravitas that should attend a memorial to 9/11, or outright insulting it.

In Time, an article entitled “Mosque Protests Add Note of Discord to 9/11 Remembrances” declared that:

On the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the morning’s rituals of remembrance in New York City were overshadowed by an afternoon of bluster and discord.

The piece was written by Ishaan Tharoor who appears to be preaching about anti-Islamic intolerance rather than giving an authentic journalistic overview of the situation. Apparently oblivious of the author’s own bluster, the article contains a link to a video where Muslims are filmed inside the Park51 building. In this video, two of the gender-segregated congregants talk of the “beauty of Islam” and criticize the anti-mosque protests. One of these, a Muslim convert named Megan Putney claimed that criticism of the mosque came from people who were not Muslim.

People who had been Muslims for far longer than the four years that Megan Putney has been a Muslim, such as Amil Imani, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, must be unaware of what the “real Islam” represents. Time is resorting to propaganda.

Many people declare themselves to be Muslims and are peaceable. Most Muslims in the West are law-abiding citizens. However, they are led and represented in too many cases by Islamists. One such leader is Imam Feisal Rauf. He is a man whose chameleon behavior could easily be described as dishonest or duplicitous. He talks of building bridges between communities, but even when these moves create divisions and dissent, he pushes on regardless. A person motivated by a desire for unity, rather than Islamist ambition, would have decided to take up Governor Paterson’s offer of a new location, away from Ground Zero.

On September 8, days before the anniversary, Rauf appeared on CNN’s Larry King show, where he gave an interview with stand-in host Soledad O’Brien. He stated:

I am extremely concerned about sensitivity. But I am also concerned about responsibility. If we move from that location, the story will be… that the radicals have taken over the discourse. The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack. And I’m less concerned about the radicals in America than I am about the radicals in the Muslim world… I meant it that – the danger from the radicals in the Muslim world than our national security, to the national security of our troops. I have a niece who works in the army in southern Iraq. The concern for American citizens who live and work and travel overseas will increasingly be compromised if the radicals are strengthened and if we do, it will strengthen the argument of the radicals to recruit, politically to recruit, and their increasing aggression and violence against our country.

In brief, it seems that he is suggesting that the mosque must remain, because if its location moves, then Muslims will attack America. This is not the language of a bridge builder, as Gadi Adelman points out in FSM today.

Yesterday CNN appeared to be proselytizing for Islam, presenting an article entitled “Imam Rauf: What’s Right With Islam.” The article was merely an extract from Rauf’s book “What’s Right With Islam,” and had no news value of itself, other than promoting Feisal Abdul Rauf.

On the web page is another video .This video, entitled “Who is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf,” also includes John Esposito, whose department at Georgetown University is sponsored by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. At 48 seconds into the video, Esposito describes Rauf as “Mister Mellow.”

The presenter on the CNN video states: “Imam Rauf is a Sufi Muslim, at the other end of the Islamic spectrum from the radical theology that feeds groups like al-Qaeda.” This is entirely misleading.

There have been many great Sufi mystics who preached peace, and Persian Sufis like Rumi and Omar Khyam wrote poetry that still inspires today. However, famous Sufis also included Timur the Great (Tamerlane or Tamberlaine, 1336 – 1405) and Ibn Taymiyyah. In 1387 Timur slaughtered most of the population of Isfahan (70000 people). Timur had a habit of building pyramids of skulls after his conquests. An eyewitness saw at least 28 towers of severed heads outside Isfahan, each tower containing at least one and a half thousand heads. In Baghdad in 1401, Timur’s army killed 90000, and had their skulls cemented into 120 towers.

In 1383 Timur had sacked the Persian town of Isfizar. Here, he did not merely create monuments from the remains of those he had killed. He erected towers of clay and bricks and inside these piled two thousand living victims, throwing in cement as the bodies filled the towers.

Ibn Taymiyyah (1263 – 1328) was the person whose ideology influenced Muhahammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703 – 1792) the Muslim preacher who, driven out of Mecca for his intolerance and divisiveness, found refuge with the house of Saud. In Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, which is intolerant of anything that is regarded as polytheism (shirk) dictates all aspects of life. Here, public celebration of any religion other than Islam is forbidden. Being a Sufi does NOT mean one is tolerant of other faiths.

Despite being promoted by the US State Department, paid by the taxpayer’s dollars to go on propaganda missions to the Middle East, and having his religious rights defended by the president, Rauf cannot abandon his political agenda.

One must remember that Rauf has refused to condemn the terrorist group Hamas, and days after the original 9/1l attacks, he appeared on 30 Minutes and blamed America for those attacks. Those comments alone should have disqualified him as a representative of America, and were reason enough for protests to be mounted against him trying to impose a mosque so close to the scene of a deadly attack by Muslims inspired by Wahhabist ideology (Obama similarly is wrong when he declares that the 9/11 attackers were perverting the religion of Islam – like the Taliban, the 9/11 attackers were following the early edicts of Islam, to the letter).

The latest strange statement by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf apparently declares that Sarah Palin has been responsible for a rising tide of Islamophobia in the United States. He said:

“What has happened is that…certain politicians decided that this project would be very useful for their political ambitions.”

If Imam Rauf were more honest, he would also admit that this project has also been useful for his own political ambitions. And as such, these ambitions are more about Islamism than they are about Islam.